There is a peculiar poetry to this part of Britain; it's there in the rattle of the looms and the huff of the steam room, in the twisting and winding of the rovings and the roar of the beaming. In the particular rhythm of the flying shuttle and the spinning jenny, the water frame, the spinning mule, the power loom.

By virtue of its location and its weather, the north-west of England once lay at the heart of British cotton manufacturing, which began as a rural cottage industry and then rapidly expanded. By the middle of the 19th century, Britain produced half the world's cotton cloth, and for the first time, men, women and children were employed in the same vast mills, working 12-hour days in the heat and the noise and the dust for very little pay. "The bad effects of the cotton business have already appeared in the pale, sallow complexions of the people in it," the justice of the peace Samuel Finney noted in 1787, "and some tender constitutions have already fallen a sacrifice to it."

Quarry Bank Mill was built here in Styal, Cheshire, in 1784, and was one of the first water-powered cotton-spinning mills. Five storeys high, built of deep red brick and Welsh slate, it lay amid rich woodland, and was fed by the river Bollin, its workers' cottages situated nearby. Today it is a National Trust property and an education centre, playing host to crowds of giddy primary-school children and a steady trickle of tourists, but in 1790 it was a successful spinning mill, employing 205 workers. By the middle of the 19th century, Quarry Bank had also begun weaving, and like many of the mills near here produced a fabric called fustian, also known as Manchester cotton, which used linen as a warp and cotton as a weft.

The success of the mill was aided by two technological advances: Arkwright's water frame, invented in 1769, which harnessed water power to the textile industry, and the construction of the nearby Bridgewater canal, which provided a cheap method of transporting raw cotton from Liverpool. This was an extraordinary period in the history of Britain, and particularly this region, a time that saw not just technological improvements but also a mass migration to the cities, the Luddite riots and the factory acts that limited the age and the hours of children working in the mills. It was an era that saw numerous advancements in cotton spinning and weaving; and new printing methods that married copperplates and the alum shale quarries of Yorkshire with stale wine, oak galls and sorrel roots.

But in the 20th century, the industry began its decline here in the north-west. The first world war halted the manufacture and export of cotton, and soon the industry began to move abroad. Between the world wars, some 345,000 people left cotton manufacturing in Britain and 800 mills closed. In 1952, Quarry Bank Mill ceased production and its machines were sent to factories in India. The building, once such a hive of activity, fell into quiet disrepair until the 1960s when renovation began, and the mill began a new life as a museum in 1978.

Stand among the looms today, feel the heat brush your face and the floorboards shake, and listen to the roar of the flyer frames. There stretch the beams of yarn and the 500 bobbins set out in the creel, each holding up to 12 miles of cotton. A cool, damp stairway leads down to the wheel itself; a giant, a monster, grown mossy and rusted, its colossal spokes still turning, heaving the river. You can get lost in the vastness of it, in the motion of it, in the grumble and groan of its working, feel yourself floored by this rush of the past.

In the quiet, dark depths of the mill, we look down the tailrace, follow the musty brown water to a view of the wild river. And then we stand in the blackness to look up the mill chimney, to catch a glimpse of grey north-western sky. Reassured, somehow, by the things that were here before the cotton came, and that still remain, long after it has gone.